FYI...the sooner the laws are passed AND ENFORCED the better.
TMT
http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/200605...BHNlY wN0bWE-
http://www.livescience.com/technolog...ll_danger.html
Poll: Ban Cell Phones While Driving Robert Roy Britt
LiveScience Managing Editor
LiveScience.com
Sat May 27, 4:00 PM ET
A new survey finds two-thirds of Americans would support a law banning
cell phone use while driving.
Fewer than half, however, wish to make them illegal in restaurants and
movie theaters.
The poll of 849 adults, of which 69 percent owned cell phones, was
conducted in March and announced this week. While 29 percent of
respondents said they did not want such a law, 65 percent said states
should ban drivers from talking on cell phones.
Previous studies have suggested cell phones cause accidents that kill
thousands of people every year and create traffic jams. Even hands-free
phone use has been shown to slow driver reaction times. Study leader
Michael Traugott of the University of Michigan said the poll results
show that people understand these risks.
"I think this is a reflection of inherent concerns about driving
safety, as well as the concern about accidents due to cell phone use,"
Traugott told LiveScience.
Some 60 percent of those surveyed said they would maintain the ban on
cell phone use in airplanes. Whether they owned a cell phone or not,
the respondents were equally likely to support that ban.
"The concern about cell phone use in planes may relate to the fact that
it is an enclosed space and people can't walk away from loud
conversations in a way they can on land," Traugott said.
Cell phone use in public places was said to have irritated 60 percent
of the respondents, but only 43 percent support banning cell phone
conversations in places such as restaurants, theaters or museums.
"The support for the use of cell phones in public places, despite the
irritation, comes primarily from cell phone owners," Traugott said.
"They seem reluctant to impose restraints on their own behavior."
The poll also showed that younger adults were more likely to support
the use of cell phones in public places and while driving.
A separate survey released in April by the Pew Research Center found
that 28 percent of cell phone owners admit to sometimes not driving as
safely as they should while using mobile devices. In that poll, 81
percent of those who own cell phones said they were irritated at least
occasionally by loud and annoying cell users in public places.
----------
Drivers on Cell Phones Kill Thousands, Snarl Traffic
By Robert Roy Britt
LiveScience Senior Writer
posted: 01 February 2005
01:52 pm ET
Finally, empirical proof you can blame chatty 20-somethings for
stop-and-go traffic on the way to work.
A new study confirms that the reaction time of cell phone users slows
dramatically, increasing the risk of accidents and tying up traffic in
general, and when young adults use cell phones while driving, they're
as bad as sleepy septuagenarians.
"If you put a 20-year-old driver behind the wheel with a cell phone,
their reaction times are the same as a 70-year-old driver who is not
using a cell phone," said University of Utah psychology professor David
Strayer. "It's like instantly aging a large number of drivers."
The study was announced today and is detailed in winter issue of the
quarterly journal Human Factors.
Traffic jams and death
Cell phone distraction causes 2,600 deaths and 330,000 injuries in the
United States every year, according to the journal's publisher, the
Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.
The reason is now obvious:
Drivers talking on cell phones were 18 percent slower to react to brake
lights, the new study found. In a minor bright note, they also kept a
12 percent greater following distance. But they also took 17 percent
longer to regain the speed they lost when they braked. That frustrates
everyone.
"Once drivers on cell phones hit the brakes, it takes them longer to
get back into the normal flow of traffic," Strayer said. "The net
result is they are impeding the overall flow of traffic."
Strayer and his colleagues have been down this road before. In 2001,
they found that even hands-free cell phone use distracted drivers. In
2003 they revealed a reason: Drivers look but don't see, because
they're distracted by the conversation. The scientists also found
previously that chatty motorists are less adept than drunken drivers
with blood alcohol levels exceeding 0.08.
Separate research last year at University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign supported the conclusion that hands-free cell phone
use causes driver distraction.
"With younger adults, everything got worse," said Arthur Kramer, who
led the Illinois study. "Both young adults and older adults tended to
show deficits in performance. They made more errors in detecting
important changes and they took longer to react to the changes."
The impaired reactions involved seconds, not just fractions of a
second, so stopping distances increased by car-lengths.
Older drivers more cautious
The latest study used high-tech simulators. It included people aged 18
to 25 and another group aged 65 to 74. Elderly drivers were slower to
react when talking on the phone, too.
The simulations uncovered a twofold increase in the number of rear-end
collisions by drivers using cell phones.
Older drivers seem to be more cautious overall, however.
"Older drivers were slightly less likely to get into accidents than
younger drivers," Strayer said. "They tend to have a greater following
distance. Their reactions are impaired, but they are driving so
cautiously they were less likely to smash into somebody." But in real
life, he added, older drivers are significantly more likely to be
rear-ended because of their slow speed.
Other studies in the journal found:
Telephone numbers presented by automated voice systems compete for
drivers' attention to a far greater extent than when the driver sees
the same information presented on a display.
Interruptions to driving, such as answering a call, are likely to be
more dangerous if they occur during maneuvers like merging to exit a
freeway.
Things could get worse. Wireless Internet, speech recognition systems
and e-mail could all be even more distracting.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Are Cell Phones Really So Dangerous?
Posted Feb. 2, 2005 at 10:15 a.m. ET
Several readers wrote to LiveScience questioning whether cell phones
were really so bad for drivers. Here is some additional information
that helps illuminate the death statistic.
The estimates of annual deaths reported in this week's article (2,600)
may well be low. The number, for U.S. deaths related to drivers using
cell phones, comes from a 2002 study by the Harvard Center for Risk
Analysis (HCRA). Researchers then estimated that the use of cell phones
by drivers caused approximately 2,600 deaths.
Because data on cell phone use by motorists are limited, the range of
uncertainty is wide, those researchers said. The estimate of fatalities
in that HCRA report ranged between 800 and 8,000.
Importantly, the researchers noted (in 2002) that increasing cell phone
use could be expected to cause the annual death estimate to rise. The
2002 estimate, for example, was up from an estimate of 1,000 deaths in
the year 2000. Logic suggests the number -- though just an estimate --
could be much higher in 2005.
The estimates are based largely on mathematical models, but they are
not without basis. In 2001 in California, for example, "at least 4,699
reported accidents were blamed on drivers using cell phones, and those
crashes killed 31 people and injured 2,786," according to an analysis
by The Los Angeles Times. That number can expected to be low, because
of the lack of formal procedures for noting cell phone use as a cause
of a traffic accident.
The Times also noted a 1997 study of Canadian drivers "who agreed to
have their cell phone records scrutinized found that the risk of an
accident was four times greater while a driver was using the phone."
Each year, about 42,000 people die in U.S. auto accidents.
Here is how the new University of Utah simulations were conducted:
Participants in the simulator used dashboard instruments, steering
wheel and brake and gas pedals from a Ford Crown Victoria sedan,
surrounded by three screens showing freeway scenes and traffic,
including a "pace car" that intermittently hit its brakes 32 times as
it appeared to drive in front of study participants.
If a participant failed to hit their own brakes, they eventually would
rear-end the pace car. Each participant drove four simulated 10-mile
freeway trips lasting about 10 minutes each, talking on a cell phone
with a research assistant during half the trips and driving without
talking the other half. Only hands-free phones were used to eliminate
any possible distraction from manipulating a hand-held cell phone.
Thirty times each second, the simulator measured the participants'
driving speed, following distance and - if applicable - how long it
took them to hit the brakes and how long it took them to regain speed.
-- RRB